The Naval Air Systems Command has been developing open architecture software for military avionics applications in collaboration with the Georgia Institute of Technology and Vanderbilt University, PCB Design 007 reported Wednesday.

The work comes under the Future Airborne Capability Environment project that seeks to make aircraft electronic systems more agile and modular using one technical standard.

The team from Georgia Tech is tasked to refine the FACE architecture by building reference software according to POSIX specifications, while Vanderbilt is in charge of the FACE Technical Standard software developers toolkit and conformance tools.

“The FACE standard lets us streamline software production and software upgrades, which are vital for keeping U.S. pilots safe and delivering our military capabilities,” said Douglas Woods, research scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, Georgia Tech’s applied research arm.

“The FACE Technical Standard lets developers connect software and hardware in a uniform way, so that one software application can work with a variety of different hardware,” he added.